Conventional separating machinery utilizes an auger or piston to pressurize the material to be separated through a screen or sieve, so that the soft material (flesh, meat, pulp juice, oil, etc.) passes through the screen or sieve, and the hard material does not or does so only in very small controlled quantities.
Such machines use an adjustment mechanism to control the separation process by regulating the pressure and or dwell time within the specified machine. The adjustable mechanism consists of a ring, sometimes referred to as a compression ring, having an inwardly tapered leading edge, adjacent to a correspondingly tapered ramp on the pressure device (auger, piston, belt, etc.) The position of this adjustable ring can be controlled to create a larger or smaller opening as desired between the ring and the corresponding surface on the auger, piston, belt, etc.
Rings, or structures associated with the rings, may include external threads that engage a worm drive to move the ring closer to or farther away from the auger surface. The spacing between such a ring and the sloping auger, piston, belt, etc. is conventionally controlled manually using a ratchet style mechanism, a hand wheel, a wrench, hydraulics, or combinations of such means. Each alternative has associated drawbacks. Regardless of which method is utilized, each change in the setting-opening is accompanied by a change in the size of the “window” afforded for evacuation of the hard materials, further aggravating the expulsion and removal of the hard materials and thereby increasing pressure within the machine, increasing temperature through pressure and friction thereby increasing component wear.
Because rings typically wear at a high rate, they must be replaced periodically. However, because of the expense associated with machining the rings, typically, only a portion of the ring is replaced. Typically, a base portion of the ring, which may include the above mentioned threads and other structure, is secured using nuts and bolts to the ring portion, which typically wears much more quickly. Such an assembly, however, may be undesirable because the nuts and bolts may be lost during cleaning of the components. Additionally, removing all the nuts to allow the ring's removal is relatively time consuming. Moreover, sometimes the nuts may “freeze” to the bolts, requiring the nuts to be sawn off to allow ring removal. The bolts, as well as the holes that allow the bolts to extend through the components, may define weak areas that are susceptible to cracking, shearing or breaking. Finally, securing the ring to the base using bolts may be problematic in that it causes difficulty in aligning the ring to the base.
Additionally, typical compression assemblies do not allow for liquid material to escape from outside the ring; such material gets trapped in the base and creates maintenance problems. When the liquid builds up, it can solidify, freezing the ring to the machine and preventing removal and/or adjustment of the ring.